The Elliott Gould Touch

It’s a little-known fact that most of New York’s movie-lovers are also marathon runners; that’s the only explanation I can find for the many empty seats in the house at Walter Reade Theatre on Sunday evening, when the in the Film Society of Lincoln Center screened a new 35-mm. print of Ingmar Bergman’s very rare and very beautiful 1971 film “The Touch,” starring Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould—in the presence of Mr. Gould, who followed the screening with a Q. & A. that was moderated by the filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie. Either part of the evening’s festivities should have sufficed to lure overflow crowds; both together should have been a mob scene. But the happy few who came out for them got the double-dip treat they anticipated.

I wrote about the film in the magazine last week (scroll down) but had never seen it on the big screen. (I had taped it off late-night television some time in the eighties.) It was a pleasant surprise to find that Bergman’s extraordinary palette, of flashy clothing and sickly walls, of Gould’s swarthiness and Andersson’s pallor, came through in the same way though with greater force—as did the confusion and pain that Bergman’s extraordinary array of closeups exposes. Bergman is a master of directing actors—of eliciting a terrifying emotional intensity in daily situations—and the audience’s occasional laughter (which, as I’ve written before, is a mark of effective melodrama, in the contrast between banal reality and grand emotion) was an uneasy proof of a collective measure of self-defense against the characters’—indeed, the actors’—passionate self-revelation.

The discussion was unusual in tone. The Safdies—who made the remarkable “Daddy Longlegs,” starring Ronald Bronstein (who is himself the director of one of the great independent films, “Frownland”)—draw on the particulars of their actors’ lives to fill out their characters, and they attempted to get Gould to admit that he was drawing on his own experience to play the part. Gould, however, picked up on their “agenda,” and made clear that the results onscreen were indeed the results of acting—and that whatever autobiography was in the movie wasn’t his, but Bergman’s. (Gould noted the similarities between the character played by Andersson and the woman Bergman lived with then and whom he soon married.)

Gould described Bergman’s screenplay as something like a novella, a written narrative—and said that, when he got to the part in the story where he’d have to play his first sex scene with Andersson, he “got a migraine.” He reminded the audience that he was Hollywood’s No. 1 male star at the time, and that he was aware of the risk he was taking with his livelihood. (He had already proven his readiness to leverage his celebrity for his art, as when he recruited Jean-Luc Godard to direct him in an adaptation of Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders,” which, in the event, was directed by Alan Arkin.) Gould explained that, for the bedroom scenes, Bergman had promised to use a “fucking machine”—a platform with a hole cut in it for the camera to peek through—but that, ultimately, the scenes were filmed on a regular bed.

He recognized both the honor and the responsibility of being “the first one of us”—American actors—“ever to work with him,” and described the tension that Bergman’s directorial style elicited, because Bergman didn’t shoot coverage; there were no cutaways to mask a dropped or spoiled moment of a scene. Yet he found Bergman to be an impeccable organizer of the shoot. Whatever the onscreen turmoil might be, “every day was administered to perfection: we ate lunch when we were supposed to eat lunch, we finished the day when we were supposed to finish the day, we had tea when we were supposed to have tea—and he gave me a piece of Droste chocolate, which I greatly appreciated.” The organization of a shoot was a matter to which Bergman gave forethought; he told Gould that his two cinematic “ideals” were Alfred Hitchcock, “for pure imagination,” and William Wyler, “as an administrative producer-director.” (Bergman added that the first time he saw Mae West in a movie he “went home and jerked off.”)

As for Bergman’s direction, Gould credits him with the “best direction” he ever got—in a shot in which Gould’s character apologizes to Andersson’s, and Bergman perceived the difficulty that Gould was having in expressing the moment’s shame and frustrated tenderness: “Your eyes are closed in this scene. I need your eyes to be open.” Bergman added that he knew that Gould was closing his eyes “because you’re afraid that you can’t give me what I need. If there’s nothing there, that’s what it’s about.” A key part of Bergman’s genius—and, for that matter, of Gould’s—is the distinction of the personal from the autobiographical. (At the same time, Gould added, “I had a feeling that Ingmar wanted Bibi and me to share our intimacy off-camera, and that was not to be.”)

What those of us who braved the Columbus Circle barricades to reach Lincoln Center got on Sunday night was a double lesson in cinema—the one on the screen, and the one imparted in person by Elliott Gould. The former ran a hundred and fifteen minutes; the latter, which ran a half-hour or so, was all too brief. It made me wish that Gould would write his memoirs.